Scientific discovery is the mission of the Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities Research Center–discovering why child development goes awry, discovering ways to prevent developmental disabilities, and discovering treatments and interventions–so that children and adults with disabilities can live, learn, work, and enjoy their lives with their families and friends in their own communities.
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New Faculty Focus:
Bobby Gibbs, PhD, is a music composer turned researcher whose deep interest and expertise in sound perception led him to the Waisman Center. The new assistant professor in communication sciences and disorders is establishing his research lab to study how strategies for optimizing acoustic information are affected by differences in the way neurons represent auditory information, such as neural degeneration and cochlear implants usage.
Gibbs’s background is originally in music composition. He plays the clarinet and uses the piano as his main composition tool. From there, he became interested in acoustics, particularly psychoacoustics, which studies the combination of the physical properties of a sound and how humans perceive it. He obtained his doctoral degree in architectural acoustics with an emphasis on spatial hearing at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.